Various objects, including mineral resources such as iron ore and limestone, are conveyed by a conveyor belt. When the objects are conveyed by the conveyor belt, the objects to be conveyed are fed onto an upper cover rubber of the conveyor belt from a hopper or another conveyor belt. The fed objects to be conveyed are carried on the upper cover rubber and conveyed in a traveling direction of the conveyor belt. When the objects to be conveyed are fed onto the upper cover rubber of the conveyor belt, the upper cover rubber is subject to impact, and when the surfaces of the objects to be conveyed are sharp, the upper cover rubber sometimes sustains cut damage. Thus, in known art, various proposals have been made (see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2014-40295A for example) in order to improve the cut resistance of the upper cover rubber.
A size and occurrence frequency of the cut damage, a wear amount, and the like occurring in the upper cover rubber significantly change depending on use conditions of the conveyor belt (including types of the objects to be conveyed). Because of this, it is preferable to perform an evaluation with requirements resembling the actual use conditions in order to accurately predict the impact durability of the upper cover rubber as much as possible. Because of this, it is required for a test device that performs evaluation to be able to set requirements matching various use conditions of the conveyor belt.
Though the object to be evaluated is not an upper cover rubber of a conveyor belt, an impact cushioning evaluation device with the purpose of evaluating the impact cushioning of a cushion body for a human such as an impact absorbing pad is known (see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2008-233016A). The evaluation device proposed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2008-233016A is provided with a bar having an impactor disposed on a front end portion, and a back end portion pivoted by a rotation shaft. It is configured so that after the impactor is moved upward by pivoting the bar with the rotation shaft as the center, the impactor can be made to collide with the object to be evaluated disposed below by lowering the impactor downward. For conveyor belts, the objects to be conveyed continuously collides with the upper cover rubber. Furthermore, the objects to be conveyed collide with an upper cover rubber that is moving. Because of these reasons, it is not possible to reproduce requirements resembling actual use conditions of a conveyor belt.